The Mathematical Inevitability of Eviction
Earlier this year, The New Yorker ran an excerpt of Matthew Desmond’s new book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
The excerpt told the story of Arleen Beale and her landlord Sherrena Tarver (both names changed to protect privacy), and how the two of them worked together to keep Beale and her two children in their apartment:
The rent was five hundred and fifty dollars a month, utilities not included — the going rate for a two-bedroom apartment in one of the worst neighborhoods in America’s fourth-poorest city — and would take eighty-eight per cent of Arleen’s six-hundred-and-twenty-eight-dollar-a-month welfare check. Maybe she could make it work, at least through the winter.
There was a knock at the door. It was the landlord, Sherrena Tarver, a short black woman with bobbed hair and freshly done nails, loaded down with groceries. (Names have been changed.) She had spent forty dollars of her own money on the food and picked up the rest at a pantry. She knew Arleen needed it. Arleen thanked Sherrena and closed the door. Things were off to a good start.
You know, when authors write “things were off to a good start,” that things are likely to change; Beale fell behind on the rent, and although Tarver tried to be generous, she had her own bills to pay:
Sherrena stepped into the hallway and walked up to Arleen, who was wearing a red hoodie. “Girl,” Sherrena said, “I got to get you up outta this house or get my money. Genuine. . . . I mean, ’cause I got bills. I got a bill to show you right now that’s gonna take your eyes outta your head.” She reached into her files and handed Arleen a tax bill for a property of hers that the city had condemned. It listed delinquent storm-water and sewer charges, fees for the board-up, and additional charges, totalling $11,465.67. Arleen stared blankly at the bill. The amount was more than her annual income.
So Beale gets evicted.
In a new interview with Slate, Matthew Desmond explains that evictions, once rare, are now becoming commonplace. Why? If you guessed “the rent is too damn high,” you’d also be off to a good start.
As Desmond told Slate:
Now we are evicting hundreds of thousands of people, probably in the millions, every year. There’s this divergence between what low-income families are making and what they have to pay to keep a roof over their heads and heat in their house. Between 1995 and today, median rent increased by over 70 percent. In the 2000s the cost of fuel jumped by 53 percent.
The entire interview is both fascinating and saddening. Here’s one of the more surprising data points:
You note that a landlord can expect about $750 a month in a white middle class suburb of Milwaukee but $550 a month in the most desperate ghetto. Why this small disparity?
When we looked at the distribution of rent in the city only 260 bucks separated the 90th percentile from the 10th percentile. Some of the most expensive and some of the least expensive apartments are not actually separated by all that much. A two-bedroom apartment in the poorest neighborhood in Milwaukee, where upward of 40 percent of people are below the poverty rate, its only $50 less a month than the citywide median.
This means that, for many people, eviction becomes a mathematical inevitability. If you’re not bringing in enough money you will eventually fall behind on the rent, and so on.
You might remember Beatrice M. Hogg’s Billfold post from earlier this month, in which she explains how hard it is to find housing after being evicted:
But no matter how much money I make, most of the beautiful apartments in the Sacramento area will be unwilling to accept me as a tenant. “No evictions, no criminal background, no rental debt.” The three qualities are lumped together as if they are synonymous.
Desmond echoes that truth, noting that eviction often forces people into “substandard housing” since no other landlords will accept their tenancy. This, in turn, de-incentivizes those people to form relationships with their neighbors, invest in their community, and so on. If you don’t like where you live, you aren’t going to treat it like a place where you want to stay.
But what about those landlords? Why are they allowed to offer substandard housing? Why did Sherrena Tarver, the landlord Desmond profiled in the New Yorker excerpt, have a rental property that the city had to condemn?
As Desmond explains, landlords in low-income neighborhoods are often experiencing their own financial difficulties, and need that tenant rent to keep going. The math compounds on itself. A landlord like Tarver can lose out on $10,000 in a month, if tenants don’t pay—and taking the tenants to court doesn’t ensure Tarver will get paid back.
After reading both the New Yorker excerpt and the Slate interview, I’ve added Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City to my reading list. If you’re interested in being part of another Billfold Book Club, I’d love to discuss it with you. Drop your thoughts in the response section and let us know.
Correction: I originally wrote “Michael Desmond” instead of “Matthew Desmond.”
